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How is Assassin's Creed IV a 25 GB download? Previous games were way smaller! Why do games get this big? My internet connection is painfully slow normally, but is currently reduced by another 40 %, for some reason. It would take 50 hours to download the damn thing!

Bought it off humble, and torrented the ISO's off humble. Perfect stable downloads :D

edit: Oh, your net is poorly?

Maybe you need to think about buying dic games more often? Often they'll go on a download service as a backup anyway.

Bought it off humble, and torrented the ISO's off humble. Perfect stable downloads :D

edit: Oh, your net is poorly?

Maybe you need to think about buying dic games more often? Often they'll go on a download service as a backup anyway.

Yeah, I guess I should, but I just hate to have a bunch of discs lying around. My download speed is usually acceptable enough that it's not much of a bother with a bit of foresight. (Although I honestly believe that I might have the slowest internet in Stockholm.) Also had no idea that it was on Humble. Still uses Uplay though, right?

Are there actually places in Stockholm without good fibre coverage these days? A 100Mbit connection goes for 250-350/month here in Gothenburg, and I've got something like 25+ providers to choose between. Even mobile broadband has decent bandwidth these days, though it's obviously a bit pants latency-wise.

I signed-up for the Final Fantasy XIV 'free trial' and played it a bit over the 14 days but - it's - well - it's

It's the most basic MMO I've played it years, EVERYTHING is "go there and kill X of them" or "go there and collect X things by killing them " or "go there and pickup things which will cause X things to appear from nowhere you'll have to kill". Added to that, there are endless Hunt/Resource awards for - well - killing things (even gathering is basically implemented as 'killing things for loot') - hell someone asked me to go find her friend (who's actually her brother) and I had to kill him and the game even laughed about the fact it happened! :)

It's very FF of course and I hate FF as a rule (that up-down scale riff is like nails down a blackboard to me) too...

Thing is tho - despite all that, I find it enormously absorbing - so I even went and bought it (£9.99 from Squeenix on-sale this week)

It's not for the story - it's not for the game - it might be for the world which is lovely to look at - it might be for the weird and wonderfully dressed/mounted players I've met (and the fact you meet people from all levels in all parts of the game is a massive plus) - it's just - well - it's a nice place to go and hit things for a while - not in any way taxing - eveytthing you do is progress of a sort etc.

The fact you can play ANY class and do ANY skill with just 1 character is - well - interesting. I find myself at Level 13 (Lancer) 7 (Archer) 3 (Tree Chopper) wondering if I should have made a character which doesn't look like Hodor (at least I didn't call it Hodor Hodor - tho I'm guilty of using a "naughty" nickname as the game chided me for "Kerr Ang" but I've been Kerrang in every MMO in history!!)

Elite Dangerous is consuming my life at a rather alarming rate. I just bought a Cobra Mk. 3 and am currently grinding credits by trading so I can upgrade it to a reasonably capable combat craft. Even with just 55 systems it is mindbogglingly massive, I just flew 5 and a half light-hours from Chango to I Bootis B/C.

Are there actually places in Stockholm without good fibre coverage these days? A 100Mbit connection goes for 250-350/month here in Gothenburg, and I've got something like 25+ providers to choose between. Even mobile broadband has decent bandwidth these days, though it's obviously a bit pants latency-wise.

Well, there is one place. This place isn't connected. It's not like other houses, but the issue is not that we can't get connected, but rather that we won't. I'm in the inner city, so my situation is probably rather unique. Anyway, it's pretty much beyond my control and I've managed to get by with this for five years now. Pretty much exactly five years now that I think about it, maybe a couple of days left.

I actually do have a sort of mobile broadband solution, but it seems to have stopped working with my desktop after my main drive failed a while back. Don't know how to get it going again, but I'll cancel it soon anyway. (Tre can shove it.)

Yeah, I guess I should, but I just hate to have a bunch of discs lying around. My download speed is usually acceptable enough that it's not much of a bother with a bit of foresight. (Although I honestly believe that I might have the slowest internet in Stockholm.) Also had no idea that it was on Humble. Still uses Uplay though, right?

Yes, but once activated (which will requisite installing patches I think) it never need go online again.

Well, there is one place. This place isn't connected. It's not like other houses, but the issue is not that we can't get connected, but rather that we won't. I'm in the inner city, so my situation is probably rather unique. Anyway, it's pretty much beyond my control and I've managed to get by with this for five years now. Pretty much exactly five years now that I think about it, maybe a couple of days left.

I actually do have a sort of mobile broadband solution, but it seems to have stopped working with my desktop after my main drive failed a while back. Don't know how to get it going again, but I'll cancel it soon anyway. (Tre can shove it.)

This was a weird experience. I can't say I liked the game itself but some parts were really good. Some other parts were really bad though. Ultra-low budget, I guess. What matters is that I was invested into this game, not for the vague story but mostly for the weirdness of it all, different level design plus gunplay was good( at last, useful shotgun, decent minigun etc) and RPG parts/uprgrades were interesting, much potential for a completely different replay, nice music. Worst things are terrible Mars level( "now... go kill 27 enemies") and horrible UI.

The fact you can play ANY class and do ANY skill with just 1 character is - well - interesting. I find myself at Level 13 (Lancer) 7 (Archer) 3 (Tree Chopper) wondering if I should have made a character which doesn't look like Hodor (at least I didn't call it Hodor Hodor - tho I'm guilty of using a "naughty" nickname as the game chided me for "Kerr Ang" but I've been Kerrang in every MMO in history!!)

What on earth did their censor object to there? Scratched my head a bit but I couldn't think of anything.

Well fudge, should've waited. The X-Com Long War mod appears to bug out around mid-game with the skyranger refusing to return to headquarters after any mission. I've loaded a few saves and confirmed this event appears to be impassable. Really enjoyed the experience up till this point.

After fiddling with Xpadder, I've managed to get Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver going. Bad points - movement and direction are a tad fiddly (although I feel this'd be the case regardless of control method), the Steam screenshot button seems unable to work and just under an hour in I've hit a dead-end. In the physical world, I've entered a circular room with a tower in it and a crystal type thing at the top in the middle...and nowhere to proceed. I've tried changing between worlds and exploring the submerged section to not avail. Hitting or trying to move the crystal seems to produce no effects. I'm afraid I'm stumped.

On the plus side, whilst the game is quite old, it actually just about holds up. Its visual style works quite well with bland and undetailed scenery and the main character's design is great. Combat works well, especially in being able to take items off the walls and use them as weapons which gives it all a scrappy feel. Plus points for being able to pull a torch off the wall, use it to ignite and finish off an enemy and then finding a bonfire near by to relight it; you're not told you can do that either, it just feels intuitive to be able to do so.

So far it seems like the controls will be the biggest challenge in the game. They're not difficult to know what they do, even when seeing keyboard inputs that you're trying to connect to whatever you've put that too on your controller, just loose and of their age. That and being stuck. If anyone could tell me how to proceed in as minimal detail as possible, mostly to stop myself feeling like an idiot with the inevitable simple solution, that'd be great.

I likeRoad Not Taken, but I don't think it works anything like as well as it should do. When the difficulty level is this brutally tough - really, seriously, headache-inducingly tough, not Dark Souls tough - it just becomes kinda hard to care about the emotional implications. Why should I ponder on the meaning of what could have happened if I saved all the kids, when to do so seems as close to utterly impossible as makes no difference? When the game viciously punishes me the moment I make a single mistake, or my finger twitches just once on the D-pad, it may not be unfair as in rigged, but it's certainly unfair as in everything is completely stacked against me and there's no room for error whatsoever.

It isn't bad that the game is this challenging, exactly, but it just kills a good deal of the deeper meaning for me, and given the developers have pretty much explicitly confirmed that's a major part of the game - i.e. that's why it's not just presented as another match-3 with a funny makeover - it's not hard to see all this as a failing. If I save the bare minimum of kids I don't think "Oh, God, those poor children, woe, woe is me, if only I'd tried a bit harder": I just tell myself "Eh, whatever, Jesus that was a pain in the ass" and move on. It's a gorgeous, absorbing, sweetly funny game, but horribly, horribly frustrating, to its detriment as much as - or more than! - its benefit, and the philosophical airs it puts on seem worryingly thin. Triple Town plus poetry appreciation just isn't the killer combo I was hoping for, I guess.

Compare that to Eidolon where the game part of that (in the angry internet sense of the word) is almost non-existent, and where this lack of mechanical substance is certainly a problem... yet I'm constantly musing at length on the themes the poem which inspired it suggests, which are clearly echoed many times over in the world-building and every aspect of the writing, and which elevate what would otherwise be a so-so walking sim into the god damned stratosphere, and where that musing feels like an intrinsic part of the experience. Two games shooting for some degree of artsy significance, one tries to do it with very traditional mechanics, one tries to let the artsiness speak for itself. One works, one doesn't, IMO. Dunno if that means anything. It just feels odd.

As was probably to be expected with Supergiant, the world-building is great, the plot is great. The combat is not good, mostly because of limited ways in which it can be used - enemy variety is limited, arenas are small, and for some reason they thought it was a good idea to have you running around waiting for your turn timer to recharge.

[Heavy spoilers]

However, despite this limitation, I honestly think the game gets the balance between in-game actions and the development of the story down perfectly. This comes down to something that was mentioned in the WiT - Red is pure action. She is nothing else, and this fits the revenge quest that the story deals with so nicely. At the end, her 'choice' to commit suicide is the only meaningful action left for her to perform, with the result that she acknowledges that her ability to do anything else wouldn't be meaningful due to the lack of people or interaction that would've followed. Rather than face further meaningless action, she instead decides to embrace the opposite, and become the meaningful person that her situation never let her be. What's best about this is the fact that your actions, as a player, follow this to a letter. The small vignettes (using the loo, washing) are largely pointless in game, instead just operating as breathing room for the player to continue her rampage. Other than that, she is operating the only way she (and the player) can do in that situation. When she speaks, finally, at the end, she moves away from that realm completely and into a place where, even if it isn't 'real' in the sense that cloudbank was (and I think it was), her actions have meaning beyond their function.

[End Spoilers]

Basically, I think it is a game where the actions of the player in game, and the plot, are perfectly in balance. This is in contrast to other games that make your actions far less than the story (Bioshock Infinite's massacre of a city) and those that try to make your actions equal to the story (Dear Esther).

Based on the experience, I've decided Greg Kasavin has been reading quite a lot of Post-Hegelian philosophy. Also, been playing the Longest Journey. It's funny seeing his name in the credits when he used to annoy me so much on his videos for Gamespot.

Going to give Hegemony: Rome a go next, as Three Moves Ahead seemed to like it so much.

I've been playing a bit of Bioshock. I'm not having fun. It's actually my second attempt but I just can't get into it. I thought that maybe the first time I didn't enjoy it because of poor performance as I played it on an old computer but it seems that's not actually the problem.

I've been playing a bit of Bioshock. I'm not having fun. It's actually my second attempt but I just can't get into it. I thought that maybe the first time I didn't enjoy it because of poor performance as I played it on an old computer but it seems that's not actually the problem.

It has one truly great scene in it and a couple of memorable ones. Other than that it's a great idea stretched out for far too long, wrapped in some very, very videogame-y design and an unexceptional first person shooter. Good, and it's iconic for a reason, but it's not something I'd say anyone has to play.

2 made a lot of the same mistakes, trod a bit too much familiar ground and strains to live up to the first game far too often (when it didn't even need to) but it did the story and the combat far, far better. Again, I'd only recommend it with some reservations, but it's still one of my favourite games of all time.

I tried to play some Dead Island but five hours in and it's plain bad. It's a poorly done Borderlands clone with none of the charm and twice its flaws.
I suppose it's bearable in coop but otherwise it's just one pointless fetch quest after another. Ugh.

I'm playing too much Euro Truck Simulator 2, for some reason. It's... relaxing? Except when speed traps or suicidal drivers irritate the hell out of me, anyway. There is something weirdly satisfying and somewhat meditative about the whole thing, though, and the sense of exploration (and the sightseeing in general) is surprisingly good.

Originally Posted by Anthile

I tried to play some Dead Island but five hours in and it's plain bad. It's a poorly done Borderlands clone with none of the charm and twice its flaws.
I suppose it's bearable in coop but otherwise it's just one pointless fetch quest after another. Ugh.

It's melee Borderlands with zombies but yes, it's only really fun in co-op. Then again, I'd say the same of Borderlands.